


To Be Well

by SenkoWakimarin



Series: Author's Recommendations [28]
Category: Cable (Comics), Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616, Punisher (Comics)
Genre: Chronic Pain, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Pain, Suicidal Thoughts, Sweet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-01
Updated: 2019-08-01
Packaged: 2020-07-29 00:28:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20073133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SenkoWakimarin/pseuds/SenkoWakimarin
Summary: Frank and pain and letting someone else in.





	To Be Well

**Author's Note:**

  * For [inbox](https://archiveofourown.org/users/inbox/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Front Towards](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19247797) by [inbox](https://archiveofourown.org/users/inbox/pseuds/inbox). 

> This hugely leans into Inbox's GUNISHER series, but can be read, obviously, as entirely outside his work. Inbox, if you want me to remove the 'inspired by' demarcation, shoot me a line.

Frank is used to pain. 

He doesn’t enjoy it, he sees no value in it, he doesn’t seek it or embrace it or martyr himself to it, but he _ is _ used to it. Nature of the job, he thinks, nature of doing what he does. He’s not going to stop -- though occasionally he does have to rest, because there’s working through pain and then there’s actively making it worse, and he’s smart enough, most of the time, to know the difference.

Frank hurts all the time, is the thing. He’s busted his back bad enough that the stiffness never really leaves, and his knees are both agony by the time he’s getting to bed. At some point or another, he’s broken every one of his fingers, and one day he knows that’s going to catch up with him, the stiffness and the ache will slow him down and he’ll pull the trigger a second too late. Sometimes, usually in spring or fall while the weather is changing, it feels like his ribs have shrunk, so the swell of his lungs with each breath is pushing at them, aching in all the places they’ve broken before.

The migraines, of course, are the worst. 

All his other pains, if he grits his teeth and makes himself breathe and stretch a little, he can mitigate, he can work through. A migraine is more like a fresh wound, every time. It needs care, it needs time, it passes when it passes.

Frank doesn’t let people see him when he’s hurting. He can tough through a slap-job patch-up, let some back alley doc stitch him up and give him an antibiotic course; he can drag himself in to the Night Nurse when he must, but for the most part, he bites down on the pain and works through it on his own. 

What can anyone else do for a migraine? Frank’s taken enough Tylenol Arthritis that he’s sure his liver will kick it next, and that barely touches what it’s _ meant _ to touch. It dulls the body pain, muffles all those ghosts of broken bones howling at him. He’s yet to find anything he can take that even touches the migraines though.

Pain like this, swallowing his head and dulling the whole rest of him, flooding him with nausea and making it impossible to sleep, is pain that should be dealt with alone. He’s pulled bullets out of his own flesh, he’s sat still as unsteady hands stitch closed deep, fresh wounds, he’s made himself laugh through torture. Sometimes pain makes him irritable; the migraines just make him tired. They cling, hours or sometimes days, and they leech from him; take his energy, his drive, his ability to conceive of the future as anything more than a stretch of more numbing, blinding pain.

“Stay just like that,” Cable says, his voice a low, unobtrusive rumble. A lot of sounds are bad, if not outright painful, in the middle of a migraine, but Cable’s voice is alright. Weak, Frank knows, weak to enjoy a thing so much, but after three days of ceaseless, stupefying pain, he’ll take what little pleasures he can find. 

Months ago, he texted Cable the IFF code to the gate, giving him access to the warehouse he’s slowly made into a sort of home base. It’s not home, he can’t let himself have one of those, but it’s safe enough, the closest thing he’s got to sinking roots back into the world. As far as he knew, until tonight, Cable hadn’t made use of the code. 

Cable wipes sweat from his face, the cloth too soft to be one of Frank’s ratty dish rags. Maybe a shirt, soft smooth cotton soaked in cool water. It feels nicer than it should, and Frank sighs. He doesn’t let people see him like this, and he should rail over the invasion, over being caught weak like this, but the fact is, he’s not got the energy. 

“Hush,” Cable says, though he hasn’t said a damn word out loud. There’s fingers in his sweaty hair, carding it back from thinning brows, petting over his temples. Cable in his head feels like soft, golden static, senseless low noise that soothes even as it crowds out everything else. It makes it hard to think, hard to be irritated by the presumption, hard to feel sick with himself for letting anyone see him done in by a stupid headache. 

The stupid headache, which has reached, despite that golden static tidal wave cresting through his mind, a new peak of pain. He feels senseless, he exists in a formless, nonsense state of pain and numbness. He’s floating, he’s sinking, bogged down by the weight of the pain screaming through his head, buoyed by the forceful calm of Cable’s mind against his own.

A few times, Cable has done… something, some _ thing _ Frank doesn’t have words to describe or define, to blast the seeds of one of these migraines away before they could take root in him. Before they grew into the ravening, maddening thing eating him alive now. He’s done other things, some weird mental twisting as he stitches wounds or digs buckshot out of the raw meat of Frank’s side and back, that turns pain into nothing, turns it into fitful, guttering pleasure. 

This is different. There’s a sense of care here, not clinical concern, not the overwhelming mental laying of hands that comes with Cable seeing him injured. Cable being careful, but he’s always careful.

It’s embarrassing to be seen like this. To have anyone see him made stupid by pain, much less someone who’s in his head, who can see and hear and feel the way he’s lost himself in there, incoherent, thoughts fragmented fractures, thready and broken.

“Hush,” Cable says again, still petting him, keeping him laying flat on his back, eyes closed, still. Frank tends to pace when the pain gets like this, restless, unable to sleep, unable to work, half-mad with pain he has no control over. He paces until he can’t anymore, and some nights that’s enough to let him get some fitful variation of sleep, laying down after he rinses the taste of puke out of his mouth and passing into a thin, listless type of sleep.

But that’s not _ all _ nights, no. There’s been nights, oh some nights, the clock ticking ever closer to dawn, where he sits on the edge of his shitty, busted down couch with a gun in his hands, clasped between his knees, thinking about the merits of suicide if something’s in your head eating you alive, waiting for light to start creeping in from the eastern window, knowing in the light he’ll turn cold to the idea of a bullet in the brain.

One day, he thinks, or rather one _ night_, the sun won’t rise fast enough, the pain will be too loud, the gun too welcoming an option. It’s not how he wants to die, but he’s going to die from a gunshot one of these days anyway. Does it matter, really, who fires the damn thing?

_ You can call me, _ Cable tells him, reproving but hideously understanding. It figures that he’s the sort who would understand that, understand the pain makes all avenues of escape seem appealing. _ Call me, Frank, I’ll come help you. Whenever you need. _

Shameful, the way that warms him, the way the raw honesty that bleeds into the sentiment makes something in him squirm and stretch. The way he wants it to be true even though he knows it’s not, it can’t be, because the kind of lives they lead guarantee only that any promise made will eventually be broken. 

Cable is humming now, something low and slow and rumbling. Frank’s eyes are closed but he’s no closer to sleep than he was when Cable showed up, and he can hear every little pause as Cable mouths the words to whatever song it is he’s thinking of. The pain is a flat, dull tone in his head, huge and impossible to ignore, but no longer rising. Cable, meanwhile, is rhythm, comforting and slow and encroaching the borders of that pain. There’s a slow war being fought in his head, and Frank’s finally starting to think Cable might win.

“It’s easier, when it’s not… dug in like this,” Cable tells him, and he keeps his words that same even, steady rumble that’s too pleasant to make the pain worse. “If you reached out sooner, I could…”

But he won’t. He knows it, and he thinks Cable does too, without needing to pick the thought out of Frank’s head. It’s hard enough for Frank to ask for help with real things; the idea of asking someone to help him with a stupid _ headache _ is sickening, weak. It’s bad enough to let Cable see him injured, real injuries, blood and broken bones and twisted, fucked over joints, but sharing the misery of a migraine that’s built over a series of too-long days with not enough water and too much time in hot, tight little rooms waiting for the shot to line up, rage giving way to exhaustion -- no. 

No, he could never ask that.

_ Oh, Frank_, Cable murmurs in his head, sad and soft and so much gentler than anyone should ever be with him. The bed creaks and the fingers in his hair shift, Cable’s massive hand cradling around the crown of his skull so dry, chapped lips can dust over his brow. Sweet, too nice. _ What am I gonna do with you? _

Frank’s lips twitch into a helpless mockery of a smile, nausea and exhaustion kiboshing the urge to laugh outright. He can think of a few things he’d let Cable do with him, sure, projecting hazy, half-formed bits of filth, not really feeling it but amused at the way Cable huffs and mutters _ jackass _ under his breath, kissing him again.

It’s impossible to say how long Cable keeps him like that. Laid out on his back, eyes closed, surrounded by Cable’s bulk. The bed’s gonna smell like him now, again, gonna keep him from wanting to change the sheets or air the room because that particular smell, sweat and earth and lidocaine ointment is too good for him to willingly get rid of. It’ll fade on it’s own, unless Cable shows up again -- Frank pointedly puts no hope or want in the idea because then it’s not a disappointment when it doesn’t happen -- and when it’s barely there or the sheets are crusted with blood again, he’ll wash things or burn them, replace them as necessary. 

They lay there, and the soft noise Cable is carefully pushing into his brain slowly, bit by bit, overwhelms the pain that’s had teeth sunk into Frank’s head for days. It’s good, that noise filling him up as it comes to a crescendo, golden-bright and sweet, pain leaking out his eyes like tears, melting away as Cable strokes his hair and breathes soft, senseless words against his temple.

Like his mattress, like this warehouse space, like the continued association with Cable in general, this moment is an indulgence he’s carefully allowing himself. Long days of migraine pain, with the light sensitivity and roiling nausea that comes when it gets bad, have exhausted the war dog in his head, so there’s nothing to snarl at him or anyone else for taking time to luxuriate in this, in not feeling, for a moment, like absolute hell. 

“Go to sleep,” Cable says, and Frank’s not even sure, now, if the words are spoken or pushed straight into his head. He turns onto his side and Cable slots in neat against him. This they haven’t done, despite all the times they’ve done so many other things, in this bed and others, on chairs on floors and in dark, barely out of the way places after a fight. They’ve fucked and they’ve slept side by side and they’ve woken up together or alone the next day but they’ve never just laid there together, soft and without expectation. 

Still, it feels good, familiar but not, Cable’s arms sliding around him, his face fitting into the crook of Cable’s shoulder. It shouldn’t be comfortable; there’s a sort of dissonance to the way metal feels, skin-warm and harder than flesh, too smooth as well, but still yielding. Frank lets himself be pulled in and held, lets the exhaustion rise in him like a gentle tide, lets the low, hollow thunder of Cable humming once more and the sweet, soft petting of his hair lull him down to a grateful sort of sleep. 


End file.
